Joie de Vivre
by Gentleman Crow
Summary: England dares not breathe.  Not while his world burns around him, not while his people suffer and their dying screams echo in his heart, and not while the one person that has always been his twin flame has been suddenly consumed by the darkness of war.


**Author's Note:** And what's this? A SHORT fic out of me? *GASP* Why yes! I wrote a one shot! I used to do it a lot, back in the day! And I had totally forgotten how much I enjoy doing it X3 And that is why I am embarking on a 100 theme challenge. I may post them mostly on DA, but I may put a few of the select ones here. I happen to like how this one turned out, so here we have my first one! #10 - Breathe Again, with some artsy fartsy frukishness for you all X3 Also canon what. This is sorta my first foray into canon, so it was totes weird to use their country names :T Also Vichy France is probably one of my favorite darker themes to explore, so enjoy!

**#10 – Breathe Again**

**Joie de Vivre**

The newspaper clippings strewn across his desk danced a macabre waltz before stoic emerald irises in the cold and steely dawn light of the office. They curtseyed with the crumpled and discarded memos from God knew who anymore and swayed and blurred in bloody ecstasy of the gruesome news they reported again and again in gleefully innocent script. And all he could do was watch. Watch helplessly as every evil unleashed upon the world centered itself on his desk to mock him in a dainty ballet of color and blood and smoke and death so precise it avoided even the stale, untouched cups of tea left by one of nameless concerned specters that drifted ever so often into his sanctum.

So England held his breath.

He had been holding his breath since the day the first of the Luftwaffe planes had torn his grey London skies to shreds and lit his world ablaze. He had been holding it since the first meeting America had soared smugly in to rise like a phoenix and liberate an embattled Europe from itself. Though still just a boy, a harlequin hero playing soldier with real guns. And he had been holding it since the last meeting where he had gazed into a pair of ancient sapphires and witnessed the last smile he would ever see.

Breathing was a luxury reserved only for those who needed it. Those teeming, living bleeding masses that sucked in the dusty gales of war and used it to fuel their tenaciously rusted gears and cogs. Fighting, always fighting. Waving his tattered flag and screaming his name into the din rising with the embers to the uncaring skies. Futile. Futile especially for him who could do nothing but feel their pain and watch from the comfort of his home while his country, his people, his body and spirit rotted to the blighted ground. Their final breaths were precious, and he had no right to selfishly take what would be forever stolen from them.

England looked down at his desk again once the dizzying cacophony of gore ceased and the litter of carnage became nothing but paper once more. The headlines sat complacently in bold text among photos and notes of parallel worlds that simply could not be. Pictures of the destruction all across Europe lay like corpses over their own epitaphs carved in India ink on the recycled flesh of their own history. China, Poland, Russia, even America had been attacked on his own soil and all of their defeats along with their victories were barked by indifferent type print and blinding flash bulbs. But there was one snapshot he had looked at again and again as if somehow, if he glared at it and cursed it enough it would dissolve into nothing and erase the deeds behind it as well. A simple photo, nothing more, but a bloated, gloating knife of victory stuck right between his ribs and left there for him to suffer as it festered and oozed.

France.

It was hard for the island nation to even believe it was his oldest rival in the photo among the German soldiers, collared and paraded like some sort of prized poodle at a show. His hair, that damnable hair he flipped and twisted in elegant fingers to bring men and women to their knees, was shorn off cruelly close to his scalp. His flamboyant colors of love and passion had been replaced by grey and black, and even those eyes, the crystal blue eyes of a nymph, of a rogue and a tramp and the most decadent sin on Earth, were lifeless and grey as the shroud in which he was clad. The world may as well have ended to see him that way. As long as France remained a trophy of conquest, chained beauty caged and controlled, England would draw no breath for himself.

France was his. His alone to insult and humiliate. He had always been his since their halcyon days of wildflower crowns for two young kings, fallen twigs turned into Excalibur and barefoot childhood trysts in the woods and dales of their infant homes. His to trip and push into the mud, to make bleed and cry and scream his name in ire and ecstasy at once. His to hold and touch in ways no one else in all of history knew how to touch him. For centuries they had played their glorious games and moved their pawns and the world had been their eternal playground. It was cosmically unfair that some young whelp had risen from the ashes and stolen that final checkmate from him that was never supposed to come.

England could not allow it. He would not allow it. And more than that, he would not allow France to allow it. An eternity of strife and love could not have a black curtain so easily drawn across it to commit it to the memory of the universe. The limelight still burned bright on their broken stage and the final act would not fall until the theatre itself had toppled down around them. Even then, they would play on, because that was what they had always done. France only needed to remember. He needed to open those puckish eyes once more and turn his face to the sun with that legendary smile that outshone it always.

But how could he, England recalled in tinny resonance within the confines of his skull.

How could he possibly? Locked in his gilded cage deep inside the pierced breast of Paris all he could see were the golden bars and the pretty embroidered silks they draped around it to remind him of the sky. Day by day he sank deeper into the darkness he had surrendered himself to, turning his face from the light as he too faded, withered, and left a trail of mangled plumage to his ruin. France heard only poisonous whispers on serpents' tongues and obeyed, lest the sword of Damocles fall upon him in his new master's stead.

Idly, England wondered if he too, held his breath. He wondered if he felt cold fingers curl around his throat to force it from his lungs instead. He glanced down at France's dead face in the photograph again and finally recoiled from his desk enraged. So desperately he wanted to breathe. He ached to break down and scream and sob and storm the battlements of Berlin to stay the steady flow of black, grey, and red that seeped across the map of all their primeval bodies. But his strength was contingent on that of his own people, and he was no longer the crimson clad terror and king of the world.

There was only one thing he could do.

If he was lost, he would make him remember.

With a deafening roar England decimated the gruesome collage on his desk. Cups of tea and saucers spun into the air and rained down sanguine drops upon the drab wings of the newspapers, photos, and memos. They smashed onto the floor in a shrill chorus one after another and before the last porcelain shard had stilled its death throes England had flung open the bottom drawer and retrieved a sheet of his stationary and an envelope. He dug frantically through the fray to snatch a pen, closed his fingers round the blade of righteousness and brought it down on the paper with the fury of the Gods in the churning heavens above.

"_Just remember._ _Only I possess the right to end you_."

Was all he wrote. He signed his name viciously underneath and tenderly folded his clandestine missive into the envelope. A tiny, musical whistle called a loyal winged friend to his window, and he entrusted it to no one but the eager little rabbit. The creature folded it preciously between his paws and took off between the emerging shafts of dawn bravely breaking through the fog of war over London. England watched him go, a hand pressed to his breathless chest, and mouthed a soundless prayer to whatever deity could still hear him.

The great nation turned away from the window and slowly walked away. He walked back into the murk and the mire. He turned his back to the rays of hope he dared not entrust his precious little hope to and reentered the harsh light and muffled voices of meeting after meeting in reality. He put his letter from his mind and let its silent measure of comfort pulse at his core as he endured the Blitz.

Days passed, then weeks. The fog and darkness grew thicker over smoldering London and brought with it a stinging, reeking acidic rain of defeat. England spent his days sealed in his chambers or attending meetings where empty promises were made with gusto and just as quickly shattered. A numb routine swept him up into its comforting white noise and he existed in shades and pictures of himself, grey snapshots flipped together in a jerky, puppeteered satire of his life until the day the clouds broke, just for a moment, and through the malaise England heard the tiny tapping at his window.

His head snapped up, he whirled around from the endless reams of tedious paperwork he endured only for something to do, and saw at last the tiny, shivering white bird desperately clutching an envelope in his beak. A bird he knew all too well. A bird that portended smug laughter, the smell of lilies, and long elegant fingers through his hair with tender words in French whispered against his lips.

_Pierre._

The chair he had been occupying hit the floor with a thunderous crash as England flew across the room and flung the window open. A grateful Pierre hopped inside, only to be immediately scooped up and cradled against a warm, familiar cheek as his precious cargo was taken from his weary beak. The crumpled pink envelope was worn, dirty, and damp from the rain, but there was no mistaking the hand in which his very name was penned in faded, running ink. England opened it with care, and with shaking fingers withdrew the neatly folded note upon which only one line was written in loopy, flowery script with a joy he had not seen in years.

"_Je suis vivant_."

France had signed his full name underneath, his real name, and as England's strength failed him and his hand dipped, several scarlet rose petals drifted from the envelope and alighted daintily on the floor.

Their vibrant russet lit the entire room, and the blushing pink of the letter seeped its warmth into his fingertips and straight to his chest that filled once more with the deep, rich breath of life. France was alive. France, his France, was still there, with eyes blue as the sky, hair like spun sunlight, and mischief in his roguish face that could not be extinguished. As long as he lived, as long as he burned in secret in the shadows of the night, enduring the darkness to the dawn and breathing in the hellfires of his torment and howl them out as a rallying cry of freedom once more, so too could he. England would fight alongside him, he would raise them both up so they could turn their faces to the light together and for them both, he would live.

He could breath again.


End file.
